


No Montagues or Capulets

by enmity



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, spoilers for their backstory i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 07:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20653106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: Neither of them are much for games, these days, but they’ve been playing the same one for years.





	No Montagues or Capulets

It’s funny, in that _ha-ha _sort of way that most things are, because the part of him that doesn’t feel sick when he looks at her is the one that remembers the same things she does, only differently, he knows. The same languid days spent chasing one another past grassy knolls and dewy fields with wooden swords in hand, the same sight of dark hair and broad shoulders and easy smile, the same golden summer whose memory they both labored endlessly beneath, and now here they are, both of them eclipsed by a specter, a shadow that keeps stretching taller and darker, long after the body had bled and broke and rotted back into the earth that bore him—uncaring of all the good he had done and could have gone on to do, had he lived. If only he’d lived.

And Felix knows, _of course_ he knows, but what he desperately struggles to escape Ingrid embraces without restraint, and it never fails to make his stomach twist, that when he looks at her all he sees is a girl who’s more a ghost than a woman, growing more and more into the skin of a dead man with each passing day.

He can’t quite manage to convince himself that it’s pity, so disgust is his second best option. _We aren’t the same_, he thinks, scowling, and never quite dwells upon how he has to force himself to look away from her, each and every time.

—

Neither of them are much for games, these days, but they’ve been playing the same one for years. There is no victor, just an unspoken tally, and they both know by now that the goal isn’t to win—it’s to see whichever one breaks first.

“You’ve cut your hair.”

“It’s easier to take care of, like this.” Beside him, Ingrid shrugs one shoulder, and her gaze is fixed someplace faraway, “Better gone than having it be blown around and getting in the way.”

He scoffs. “Pragmatic as ever."

“I would have done this sooner or later. I doubt the knights would let me in, otherwise." She pauses for a moment, her smile mild and nervous around the edges, and she’s never stopped clinging to that last bit of self-consciousness—the part of her that begs to be told that the path she’s choosing is as good as running away. “Did you remember? Glenn used to like helping with my braids. He said my hair looked nice long; I kept it that way for so many years.”

“Well, he’s wrong,” Felix says, offhanded and callous, and it’s too easy, to take in the surprise flashing across her eyes, the brittle way her gaze flickers downwards, like it does whenever he insults another sacred piece of her memory. It's all she has, he thinks, at the same time he wonders if she'll ever understand the foolishness of feeling offense on behalf of the dead. “Long hair’s never really suited you.”

But the triumph drains away when he catches the faint pink splashing across her cheeks, and he realizes then, that it’s a color he hasn’t seen on her in a long, long while. Not since—

“I know,” Ingrid sighs, her eyes closed as though resigned, and it’s only after the moment is over that he realizes: he’s forgotten to keep the tally.

**Author's Note:**

> THIS WAS REQUESTED. and took like forever to write. R I P


End file.
